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Update on Adobe Linux Flash Player

07-22-2006, 08:01 PM

Mike responded to the Digg report on the Linux Flash Player Stoppage.

Here's an excerpt...

Originally posted by Mike Melanson

Following up on yesterday's issues, remember that Flash does things that are not strictly multimedia related. All the multimedia stuff -- the A/V output, the A/V input -- we have that pretty well nailed down, though it does pop back up every so often. The problem that had me stopped was unrelated to audio or video. I'm not going to re-hash the details because it's extremely tedious and because I have already spent the last 2 days explaining it to anyone who would listen.

I came up with a solution. So I am back in today to implement it, since I basically lost all of yesterday to my main dev box. Yeah, I finally fixed that too, and without having to jump distros.

If anything, I'd love to see Dreamweaver support on Linux. It runs through wine 'semi-reliably', but a native version would be so much better.

Anyways, I am a noob here. What exactly is the problem with the Flash player in Linux? Are these people talking about the dev tools? I've never had an issue with Flash ever, that I can recall at least.

Comment

What exactly is the problem with the Flash player in Linux? Are these people talking about the dev tools? I've never had an issue with Flash ever, that I can recall at least.

Adobe (and before them, Macromedia) haven't updated flash player since version 7. Flash 7 is of course 32-bit (I am guessing it came out around the time or right before the first Opteron processors were coming out). Basically those of us running 64-bit Linux can't use 64-Bit Firefox with flash. Also, websites are slowly moving away from Flash 7 towards the newer 8 and 9 technology leaving us all in the dark. Anyway, Adobe and Macromedia have been promising an updated Flash player for years now and have not delivered. It keeps getting delayed for one reason or another. The blog linked to above is written by (I think) the only developer they have working on the project. He posted a few days ago that he was having a hard time making progress, which made many people unhappy, especially since Flash 9 was released recently for Windows and a universal binary for OS X quickly followed.

Comment

Oh ok, thanks for the info. I had never run into an issue personally before, so I didn't have clue. I guess I had not been using a 64-Bit version of Firefox in the past, because I didn't note any issues in SuSE 64-Bit when I used it recently.

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Penguin.SWF is written by one of the developers in the team working on Flash Player 9 on Linux. The blog post above informs us that the development is back on track, the author responding to the story that the Flash Player stoppage news may bring down the final nail to the Linux support coffin.

Most websites use Flash 8, which is why the Flash Linux update is good news, at least to me. Adobe opted to skip Flash 8 and work on Flash 9 instead though... although most users want Flash 8.

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Ok, now I see what part of the problem is. Replaced the 32-Bit version of Gentoo with the 64-Bit on my Intel... I think I am going to stick to 32-Bit on my main rig. The lack of flash would really take the comfort out of web surfing...

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Things are going swimmingly right now. As in, I can play multiple Flash videos in multiple Firefox browser tabs with nary a crash nor a thread hang. In fact, I'm feeling so confident about the stability that I'm actually composing this entry while a YouTube music video plays in another tab. Nervously, but still.

I am thinking about the next level-- creating a single binary that can work reliably across multiple Linux distributions. I know this may sound simple, but there are problems that can crop up, which we have been dealing with one by one. This afternoon, I created a build and tried it across several Linux installations we have handy around the office. Here is the success report:

I won't bother you with the details of which distros did not work in this impromptu test for fear of starting rumors that we don't plan to support those distros. The task now is to make those distros work just as well.